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First time accepted submitter mebates writes "Two newly discovered protists, found in the guts of termites, were named after monstrous cosmic entities featured in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos as an ode to the sometimes strange and fascinating world of the microbe. From the article: 'The single-cell protists, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque, help termites digest wood. The researchers decided to name them after monstrous cosmic entities featured in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos as an ode to the sometimes strange and fascinating world of the microbe.
'When we first saw them under the microscope they had this unique motion, it looked almost like an octopus swimming,' says UBC researcher Erick James, lead author of the paper describing the new protists, published in the online journal PLoS ONE.'"

Will drive you mad... look at how many times the phrase "featured in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos as an ode to the sometimes strange and fascinating world of the microbe." is used in the story??? MAD?!!!!

Indeed, the Great Old Ones shall not be mocked! Anyone got some tartar sauce?

I've often wondered if people of the modern age would be as affected by an encounter with these creatures as the people of grandfather's time.

Raised on decades of science fiction, horror, twilight zone and outer limits, such an encounter would be grave and dangerous, but perhaps not quite as sanity-altering as it once was. We have context for comparison, the unusual would seem less... incomprehensible.

We're also starting to unravel the scientific basis of these unfathomable entities. I'll just leave this [arxiv.org] here.

I dunno about that. Have you ever encountered something truly CREEPY? I'm not a real high strung person, but I can tell you that for sure you it is pretty surprising how disturbed you can become in the right (wrong) circumstances. I'm skeptical we're any better at handling these things than reasonably educated and experienced people of the past. It may be true that more members of today's society are more used to being exposed to new things, but I think you'd find that most people are still kinda not that far from what they were like 100 years ago.

I recently tried to get Open University software running properly on Windows 7. Does that count as truly creepy? (I still wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with fleeting dreams of arcane compatibility modes and tentacles).

Raised on decades of science fiction, horror, twilight zone and outer limits, such an encounter would be grave and dangerous, but perhaps not quite as sanity-altering as it once was.

The people of our grandfathers time, and beyond, were raised on a steady diet of some fairly creepy and horrifying ghost and creature stories... there's much more to the old world than Han Christian Andersen. At any rate, encountering something creepy in real life is *very* different from 'encountering' it on the big or little screen or between the pages of a book.

Reading about a zombie/monster or watching a movie about them and meeting one face to face is quite different. I can watch a movie where people are being shot at and think it is cool. I have, unfortunately, been in a situation where I was shot at and it was not cool... At all. My friend was actually hit (in the leg) and he did not find it cool either.

And indeed you should! Them being great evils vastly more powerful than humans doesn't change that Cthulhu & co are refugees from even greater evils that are in turn vastly more powerful than them.

The usually overlooked central theme of Lovecraft --the very theme that makes it genuine horror rather than monster stories-- is the premise that greater intelligence and power unavoidably requires greater evil as a prerequisite.

Lovecraft's stories are/were his personal cry for help, he doesn't want his premis

I've often wondered if people of the modern age would be as affected by an encounter with these creatures as the people of grandfather's time.

The underlying theme in the Lovecraft universe is that the Elder Gods not only seem incomprehensible but that they actually are incomprehensible. The more you study them and their nature, the more your own internal ordering of the universe will break down and in the end your understanding of the universe is so different from the observed universe the rest of us experience we will recognize you as insane.

You cannot escape this simply by being used to weird things: The Elders Gods aren't just weird, they are completely wrong and yet they exist. Trying to reconcile this with the observed universe leads to madness because the two cannot be reconciled.

Exactly. One of the implicit assumptions is that a healthy human mind is fundamentally incapable of understanding important fundamental truths about the universe. It is simply the limits of our biology.

Those who attempt to transcend these limits become, at best, insane, or, if genuinely successful in pursuing this path, something inhuman in every pejorative sense of the word. To transcend human biology in this manner requires giving up every kind ethical idea the human mind understands, as a down payment.

Getting used to the merely weird is ultimately no defense. The terrible things that really matter are inherently destructive to human minds. As a pedestrian example, no one really gets used to being in the thick of WWI trench warfare. Some adopt mental strategies and call on moral reserves that slows the rate of their decline, but decline is inexorable. Given enough time, everyone becomes a permanent mental basket case from trench warfare, some merely sooner than others.

It is worth noting that the Great War weighed heavily on the minds of Lovecraft's generation of artists. For some, that war shattered the belief in the inevitable progress of the human race built on the foundation of Enlightenment. Perhaps the human race as moral creatures peaked in 1913, and the lessons of the war were pebbles in the oncoming avalanche of future horrors? That is the emotional playground Lovecraft danced in, when writing the Mythos tales.

the reason we haven't found 'The Great Old One' is because he's not in a singlular spot...but i'm willing to bet if there was a 'family reunion' of these little critters...if there was a ba-jillian come together...we may just have some sort of 'celestial alignment'...creating peculiar geometries within the mind...

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